The Hubble space telescope has reported the possible discovery of a galaxy roughly 13 billion lightyears from Earth. While that's still in the confirmation process, the Subaru and Keck space telescopes have spotted a confirmed galaxy 12.9 billion lightyears away from Earth, officially making it the most distant.

The discovery was a complicated process which had the telescopes gathering light for 37 hours before being able to zero in on the candidate. All the astronomers had to do after that was pick out 2 potential galaxies from 59000 other objects. The galaxy has been dubbed SXDF-NB1006-2 and confirmed to be the most distant galaxy from earth.

This kind of distance would put the age of the galaxy at 12.9 billion years as a minimum. That means the galaxy was around not long after the Big Bang created the universe. The Big Bang is believed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago, so SXDF-NB1006-2 had to be created no longer than a mere 800 million years after the event. Age is a very important factor here because one of the main reasons that space telescopes exist is that they help look deeper into the history of our universe.